COLUMBIA, S.C.—Boeing workers’ overwhelming anti-union vote at the aviation giant’s 787 Dreamliner plant in South Carolina is a big victory for Southern politicians and business leaders who have lured manufacturing jobs to the region on the promise of keeping unions out.
It’s also a win for the company that will host President Donald Trump at its North Charleston facilities Friday.
Nearly 3,000 workers were eligible to vote Wednesday on representation by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers. According to Boeing, nearly 74 percent of the more than 2,800 votes cast were against representation.
It was a massive victory for union opponents, in line with longstanding Southern aversion to collective bargaining. At 1.6 percent, South Carolina maintains the lowest percentage of unionized workers in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its neighboring states, North Carolina and Georgia, hover slightly higher but still in low territory, at 3.0 and 3.9 percent, respectively.
Other largescale Southern unionization efforts recently haven’t met with success. In 2014, Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, turned down representation by the United Autoworkers. For years, organizers have campaigned for representation among Nissan workers in Canton, Mississippi, but no vote has been scheduled.
Boeing came to South Carolina in part because of the state’s minuscule union presence.
“I think a failed vote isn’t that big of a deal because that’s frankly the norm in the South,” said Jeffrey Hirsch, law professor who specializes in labor relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The culture here, at least in recent memory, has not been pro-union.”
Politicians such as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have directly and, via her labor secretary Catherine Templeton, adamantly spoken against the need for unions there.
“We'll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina,” Haley said in a 2012 address. She has since been appointed ambassador to the United Nations by President Donald Trump.
During her 2014 re-election campaign, Haley said she and others “discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”
Union opposition in this heavily Republican state is tied to politics, given Democrats’ longstanding ties to unionized labor. Any lenience toward unions could be seen as giving Democrats a toehold in the state, where both legislative chambers and the governor’s office have long been controlled by Republicans.
“If they were successful it would be huge, I think,” Hirsch says. “The numbers by themselves are not going to move the dial nationally in a substantive way, but the symbolism of it would be quite large.”
